I Choose to Live: Mobility Work in and in between Cairo and Amsterdam

Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with
Egyptians in Cairo and Amsterdam,1 along with interviews conducted for our podcast de Verbranders, in this paper, we describe
the activities in which people engage as they strive to cross
borders meant to keep them out and settle in places designed
to exclude and subordinate them. We term these activities ‘mobility work’ arguing that wherever borders place obstacles between
people and the lives they aspire to lead, there is also the work of
overcoming these obstacles. In theorising mobility work, we pay
attention to what people do as they encounter and surmount
borders, rather than the identities imposed upon them by borders, incorporating insights from feminist scholarship on reprocductive labour to grapple with the scope and depth of this work.
Empirically, we observe that mobility work is unequally distributed, encompasses both legalised and illegalised activities, and is
carried out individually and collectively. It multiplies as borders
proliferate, interlocking in intricate ways with nationality, race,
gender, class, age, and ability. Nonetheless, even as restrictions on
mobility deepen and rearticulate these inequalities and shape
self-identifications, our study also sheds light on people’s waywardness as they choose to live.